I'm a San Francisco-based Assistant Managing Editor with a focus on wealth. I edit mostly, but also write about how the richest get wealthy and how they spend their time and their money. My colleague Luisa Kroll at Forbes in New York and I oversee the massive reporting effort that goes into Forbes' annual World's Billionaires List and the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list. The former gets me to use my rusty Spanish and Portuguese. In 2014, I won an Overseas Press Club award for an article I wrote about Saudi Arabian billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; I also won a Gerald Loeb Award with co-author Rafael Marques de Morais for an article we wrote about Isabel dos Santos, the eldest daughter of Angola's President. Over 20 years my Forbes reporting has taken me to 17 countries on four continents, from the slums of Manila to palaces in Saudi Arabia and Mexico's presidential residence. Follow me on Twitter @KerryDolan My email: kdolan[at]forbes[dot] com Tips and story ideas welcome.

Samasource Taps Silicon Valley To Create Jobs For Poor People

Forget microfinance. Leila Chiriyath Janah is betting that “microwork” can be an even more successful route to alleviate poverty. Samasource, her three year old San Francisco nonprofit, has found simple computer-based work for 1,200 people living in poverty in Kenya, India, Pakistan, Haiti, Uganda and South Africa. The paying clients? Technology companies like LinkedIn, Intuit and Google.

“We’re creating an entirely new type of company,” says Janah. By providing work to those who’ve never had it, “we’ve been able to transform communities of people.” (See my article in the new June 27 issue of Forbes about Samasource here.)

Janah, 28, came up with the idea for Samasource after eight years of wrestling with development issues –as an African development major at Harvard and a series of jobs that included a year at the World Bank. Ultimately she didn’t think aid was the right answer. “There’s a huge disconnect between what poor people were asking for and what aid agencies are delivering,” she laments. What so many of the people Janah met really wanted was a job that pays decently.

In this video interview below, Janah talks about the failure of development aid to create wealth and why Samasource can make a difference:

Since it was founded, Samasource has teamed up with 16 partner organizations in six countries – outfits that have computers, an Internet connection and willing employees. Samasource takes work orders from a U.S. tech company, breaks them down into simple tasks it has dubbed microwork, and sends it off to a partner in say, the rural Indian state of Jharkhand, where most of the other jobs are low-paid, backbreaking work in the coal mines. Microwork encompasses a broad range of tasks – anything from data entry to image verification and information retrieval. The Samasource partner in Haiti was set up to translate text messages from Creole to English. One project for a Kenyan partner entailed describing images for blind students.

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